Even before the dust has settled, the financial crisis is a subject that’s been waiting for the right filmmaker to come along and nail it. That person is Charles Ferguson, the veteran documentarist whose Iraq occupation film No End in Sight (2007) was, like his new one, deservedly Oscar-nominated. Inside Job tackles the mess head-on with a kind of bitter pragmatism, reconstructing the system that failed and circling its weak spots.

Ferguson has a particularly rare combination of assets as a non-fiction filmmaker. He knows how to break down a subject so that it makes fresh sense, to get crucial access to both helpful and hostile interviewees, to corner those running for cover with killer questioning, and to shoot his movies with care and polish.

His approach is pretty slick, almost to a fault – the penthouse-level shots of Wall Street over the credits ape the sheen of a Hollywood thriller. We’re invited to see this as a heist movie, the story of a scam, like The Sting.

Anyone unclear on the difference between, say, collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps will be helpfully enlightened here, and shown how the colossal gambles of financial institutions amounted to a kind of roulette game with global markets. Ferguson digs into the psychology of trading, and the madness of bonuses – how the whole culture was incentivised, and still is, to encourage the riskiest and most profitable sales of subprime debt.

Along the way, inevitably, he makes some enemies. His initially polite interview with George W Bush’s chief economic advisor Glenn Hubbard, a proponent of deregulation with much to keep quiet about, sticks out as increasingly uncomfortable, even unnerving viewing. There aren’t exactly any direct hits, just a lot of icy denial, under a mask of civility boiling with self-incriminating fury. If Hubbard’s face remained on camera for even 10 seconds longer, you get the impression it might explode.

The main thrust of Ferguson’s argument becomes the corruption of a system whose gamekeepers are also its poachers: regulation and safety mechanisms are hardly top priorities when the alleged protectors of the economy have so much vested in its exploitation. Not all of this is news, and some of it amounts to shouting at a brick wall, but it’s reasoned shouting. Next to the scare-bomb tactics of a Michael Moore, Ferguson’s cogency and patience feel like adult tools for an adult task.

Inside Job:Seven Magazine review, by Jenny McCartney

Seven rating: * * ** *

One of the few positives to emerge from 2008’s global economic meltdown was that the exaggerated respect many of us had for the intellectual abilities of economists was rapidly deflated. How had the bulk of these people, who lectured with such authority on the complexities of financial systems, been blind to the imminence of the crash?

Charles Ferguson’s fascinating, forensic documentary, Inside Job, provides some of the answers, rooted less in ignorance than in raw greed and the power of the herd mentality. The film, narrated by Matt Damon, provides a broad historical background for the 2008 banking collapse – the increasing deregulation of financial services industries from the Reagan era onwards – before zeroing in on the growth of specific flaws after 2000.

Ferguson provides a well-judged balance between holding the hand of those viewers who don’t speak fluent money, and forcefully skewering some of the players whose decisions contributed to this disastrous drama. Some consent to interviews, while others, such as Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, don’t. It was he who consistently opposed the regulation of the toxic market in “derivatives”, in which bankers made staggering profits while taking ever wilder risks with their clients’ money.

The film illuminates how representatives of high finance also worked for government and in academia, to the point at which there were few truly independent voices exerting any influence on government policy-making. When such voices did emerge, they were forcefully extinguished.

Brooksley Born, as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, attempted to regulate the market in derivatives in the Nineties, but was quickly opposed by other regulators, including Greenspan himself and the then Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers.

Raghuram Rajan, a far-sighted chief economist to the International Monetary Fund, presented an accurate, high-level paper in 2005 criticising the direction of the financial sector, but was aggressively criticised by Mr Summers, then the president of Harvard. It will not console viewers to know that Mr Summers, who appears to have had a peculiar genius for getting the big picture radically wrong, is now the director of the National Economic Council in the Obama administration.

Ferguson has just enough material on the lunacy of the masters of the universe to keep indignation burning, without resorting to the kind of flashy stunts favoured by fellow polemicists such as Michael Moore. Once, an investment banker could expect a respectable but not insane salary, yet by the Nineties and Noughties, many had attained rock star status and salaries, with cocaine and prostitute habits to match.

The follies were legendary: one former employee described how Richard Fuld, the former CEO of the ill-fated Lehman Brothers, had a personal lift that took him directly to his office without having to encounter other staff.

More often, however, the true devil lies in the detail of prominent economists frequently espousing decisions which furthered their personal financial interests, connections which were not openly declared.

After the crash, will there be a clean-up? Ferguson thinks not, as Obama’s election pledges for tighter regulation seem to have disappeared into a “Wall Street government”. But this time round, we can’t say we haven’t been warned.